


sounds of people

by paisana



Series: Touch Telepathy [2]
Category: The Social Network (2010)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Post-Canon, Touch Telepathy, my god i'm so lonely so i open the window
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:09:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23530600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paisana/pseuds/paisana
Summary: For no reason at all, Eduardo and Mark can read each other's thoughts and feelings whenever they touch. But then they go years without speaking to one another, and it's a difficult thing to get used to.Really this should be a second chapter to my other fic in this universe, but that one has such a happy ending that I didn't want to mess it up. You can mostly understand this without having read that, but I would still recommend it! And I promise this ends on a positive note too.
Relationships: Eduardo Saverin/Mark Zuckerberg
Series: Touch Telepathy [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1693327
Kudos: 38





	sounds of people

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this last year but never posted it. The quarantine has me deep in my Google Docs haha

When Mark drags him out to fucking California to sign himself out of the company, it’s like nothing he’s ever experienced before. At first he thinks he must have it wrong, and then he learns that he doesn’t, and the first thing he’s conscious of thinking is that he doesn’t need to be crying in front of Mark right now, knowing how much worse that would make this all.

Of course, by the time he lays eyes on him, it’s too late for that.

Before he can think about it, he’s left the conference room and Mark’s name has made its way out of him from somewhere. If he ever had any patience for his computer geek bullshit before, it was all a fucking waste, so why shouldn’t he smash his laptop where everyone can see it? God, of all the people to have a telepathic fucking connection with. At least if he smashes Mark’s laptop, it’ll give him somewhere to put all this rage he can feel undulating through him. It’ll make sure Mark feels less of it crashing against his mind, the _asshole_ – and, fine, it'll make sure he doesn’t get a chance to notice betrayal somewhere in there, too.

What he wants out of this is to make Mark face up to everything, take away any hope he may have had of not needing to deal with Eduardo directly. Somewhere, he also wants to make it real that it’s Mark doing this to him; he wants to hear the words come out of his mouth. Mark, who he’s talked down from midterm freakouts, Mark who used to call him and just sit silently on the other end of the line, Mark who he’s dreamed about and stood in the rain for, Mark whose bed he’d cross campus to crawl into at 3 AM. He let this guy inside his _head_ , for fuck’s sake. This person who he’s shared so much of himself with has just gone behind his back to force him out of something they started together, and Eduardo has never hated the connection they have more. It makes him feel dirty, makes him humiliated at how fucking vulnerable he’s let himself be, and it makes him all the more angry with Mark for taking that vulnerability and shitting all over it.

Sitting across from him at the deposition table later on, he still can’t wrap his head around how Mark could do this to them. He doesn’t want him anywhere near his mind anymore, but it does strike him that, this far away from him, he can’t even touch him.

*

A few years later he dreams about Mark, like he used to. 

When he wakes up he’s in cold sweats, and he’s angry with himself for thinking about Mark and not hating him. It’s late enough in the morning that he could justify getting up to start his day, but he doesn’t, he sits up in his bed instead, holds his glass of water with two hands. What he thinks about isn’t what it was like to share his mind with someone else, it’s the feeling of Mark’s hand on the small of his back. He thinks about how he would recognize it, still, and how it would bring him to his knees if it were any more real than a memory.

He goes over to his window and the view is so familiar to him. The squat but clean buildings across the street, the city skyline behind them. He’s lived in this apartment since he moved to Singapore; he knows the view from his bedroom off by heart. That awful skyscraper with a bar of purple light all up and down its side. It’s seen him through some of the worst years of his _life_.

The memory of Mark still hurts when he presses on it, but he considers himself nearly over it all; he’s mostly okay with his life in Singapore. He can just see people walking around on the sidewalk below him, and if he opened his window, he could hear them. Sometimes he wonders what would happen if he stuck his head out, shouted at them, _Do you hear me, down there? Do you realize we’re living the exact same moment? Can you see me?_

Really, he doesn’t _need_ them to see him; he has friends he likes well enough, and things to do every day. But he always gets this way after dreams about Mark. 

If he looks out of his window for too long the feelings he has about his view will well up unpleasantly inside him, and it’s so fucking frustrating that he can’t share them with anybody, that even if he tells someone, they won’t understand. The truth is that he’s almost forgotten just what it felt like to have someone else in his mind, but he misses how easy it was to know there was another consciousness out there that was open to him. After that, it’s like everyone in his life now is impossibly far away from him, like they’re speaking a different language. What this is is loneliness. 

He puts his cup in the sink and starts to get ready for work before he can get to thinking about how wonderfully lucky he was that this other consciousness was Mark’s. What would he have said about that thought the day he got the contract, or during the depositions?

He remembers to grab an umbrella before he leaves the apartment. The rest of his day involves much fewer dramatics than his morning.

*

In the time right after the lawsuit, he would always spend the first hour of any conference even remotely related to social networking tensely making sure no one from Facebook that would talk to him was there – especially not Mark. Eventually the habit wears off, but he’ll still find himself wondering idly if he’ll run into anyone. He never does.

The thing is that it’s just like Mark to sneak up on him the way he eventually does.

*

By the time his Mom convinces him to visit everyone in Miami during the holiday season, it’s late enough that the only ticket he can find on a decent airline has a 20 hour layover in London. He thinks upon buying it that he’ll make the most of it, get to know a new city while he waits, maybe hit a bar or two, but on the day of, he’s met with the grim reality of killer jetlag.

He takes a taxi downtown and does his best to look around for a bit, but he doesn’t last long before he’s stumbling into a Starbucks to order a Venti black coffee.

He’s waiting on the side for his order to be ready when he notices Mark fucking Zuckerberg sitting at a table by himself, very pointedly not looking at him. They call out his name and Mark looks out the window so he’s facing directly away from the counter.

Eduardo isn’t sure what makes him do it, whether it’s the sleep deprivation or the unreal feeling of being in a different city or the loneliness or the fact that Mark is hunched over on himself in the exact way he was on the night they met. He goes up to him and he doesn’t think about it much until he’s coming up on Mark’s table and he’ll either have to give up and leave or cuss him out.

Or sit down in front of him. “This seat taken?” he asks, and it comes out like a croak.

Mark looks up at him, but there’s nothing Eduardo can read on his face. “No,” he says, and a beat later, “Go ahead.”

He sits down in the chair facing Mark and he can’t come up with anything to say except to ask Mark how he is. When he returns the question, Eduardo says something about being tired, explains about the layover, and the conversation ends with Mark humming in acknowledgement.

Eduardo doesn’t think to ask what brings Mark to town until about a minute later. “Wedding,” he says, “Old friend of mine is getting married.” He has this look in his eye like he’s thinking of something else and it makes Eduardo want to look away.

“Anyone I would know?” he asks, deciding to address the elephant in the room that is their shared history.

Mark shakes his head. “Knew him in high school, but we got back in touch about a year ago, maybe a little more.” They both think of it, but neither of them mention that Eduardo might have met him that time he visited Mark’s hometown. By this point Facebook is open to the public, so he doesn’t have to ask how they got back in touch.

Instead, he talks about how his family’s doing, and asks Mark about his. 

He used to have this way of speaking like he was thinking out loud, but he needed to translate everything for it to be understood. He would look at you when you were talking in a way that came off as very intentional, like he had had to learn how to make people think he was paying attention, or like he was trying to see behind everything you were saying – Eduardo was never sure, back when he knew him.

He had forgotten these things about him, but they haven’t changed.

He’s still funny in this understated kind of way, all smart comments delivered quietly, like he’s letting you in on something. His natural way of holding himself is so open, not brash or arrogant or even friendly, but always ready to take in information. Eduardo has forgotten about these things too, so that looking at Mark feels to him like looking at a memory. It makes it so, so, easy to fall into the way he used to interact with him, and it's terrifying. It prevents him from relaxing around him completely because of how his awe for Mark has been used against him in the past. But, though he can’t melt into the way they used to be completely, he feels so lucky just to be able to feed off of his energy again.

It’s dark out by the time they leave, though that doesn’t mean much for London in winter. The streetlights are on and he’d be lying if he said he didn’t like the way Mark looked under them, as fucking infuriating as it is. It doesn’t make sense that Mark could make him forget everything so easily, and he doesn’t _want_ to, but then as they’re saying goodbye he throws his hand up onto Mark’s shoulder, easy as anything, forgetting, and then Mark is asking him if he wants to go back to his hotel room.

And Mark feels so familiar; his mind feels just the same, though of course he’s feeling different things. Eduardo doesn’t bother combing through, nearly overwhelmed just at the sensation of his mind making room for Mark so easily, the way it used to. Still, he’s interested to find out what he could be thinking, what he could say.

In the moment he thinks it’s probably a mistake (though in the future he doesn’t), but he says yes.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're wondering whether I was listening to Mitski too much when I wrote both of these, I don't want to talk about it ahsgdjhfkj


End file.
